Whether you are a weekend warrior or serious athlete, The Vision Therapy Institute can give you a competitive advantage by improving your dynamic visual acuity, hand-eye coordination, depth perception, visual tracking and reaction time. By teaching our patients how to control their vision with greater agility and efficiency, we establish visual confidence. These skills lead to improvements on the field and increased self-confidence in life.

Not much happens in sports until your eyes instruct your hands and body as to what to do! Accurate vision and athletic visual skills can be measured, developed, and enhanced through Vision Therapy. We can measure and successfully improve eye-hand coordination, visual reaction time, peripheral awareness, eye teaming, focusing, tracking, and visualization skills (to mention just a few).

Sports vision training helps the athlete improve many vision and motor abilities necessary to increase performance, including:

  • Dynamic visual acuity helps improve the athlete’s ability to see things clearly while in motion or helps the athlete track moving objects.
  • Eye-hand coordination determines how well the athlete coordinates control of their eye movement with their hand movement. Improving this skill increases the athlete’s ability to guide reaching, grasping, passing, and hitting within their sport.
  • Eye focusing (also known as accommodation) refers to the strength, flexibility, and accuracy of the eye focusing system. Accommodative skills allow the athlete to keep objects in focus as well as quickly change focus during the game.
  • Peripheral vision refers to our side vision. Improving peripheral vision helps the athlete see objects outside of their focal point. Improving peripheral vision gives the athlete a wider view of the field.
  • Visual tracking is the ability to move our eyes from spot to spot while maintaining focus on the object we are looking. Improving visual tracking advances the athlete’s reaction time, speed, and fluidity within their sport.
  • Visual reaction time refers to the amount of time it takes for environmental stimuli to travel from our vision system into our motor system to produce a physical reaction. Improving visual reaction time helps the athlete hustle up their response time, by training the brain to work more efficiently.

Keep your eye on the ball – if you can. Vision has everything to do with sports performance. All of the major league baseball teams do vision therapy. Hockey teams, tennis players, lacrosse players and basketball players all need good depth perception and eye-hand coordination.

Any sport, including golf, requires good visualization skills as well. The United States men’s volleyball had a vision therapy specialist helping the team for years. Many professional athletes owe part of their success to vision therapy; the others had naturally perfect eyes. It requires a unique set of visual skills to succeed in any sport. For more information, see www.aoa.org/sports-vision.xml.

Sports vision therapy in the media: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/15/AR2009031502603.html


Webinar on Sports Vision with Dr. Daniel Laby from the SUNY College of Optometry: https://visionhelp.wordpress.com/2017/10/11/sports-vision-science/